A Mallika Restaurant in Bangkok

Michael Babcock, December 1st, 2012

A. Mallika is one of our favorite Bangkok restaurants. The food in Thailand is, of course, one of the main attractions of the country. Kasma takes most of her small-group tours to Thailand to A. Mallika for one of their first in-country meals and the food is always spectacularly good.

Outdoor seating at A. Mallika

Inside A. Mallika

(Click images to see larger version.)

There are two options for seating at A. Mallika. There’s an outdoor seating area with a pond under a large tree with potted plants decorating the area. It’s an attractive area but we usually opt to sit inside because we typically are at A. Mallika for lunch and in the middle of the day it can be quite warm outside. There are a number of different rooms indoors, including the room above, which has many tables, as well as private (air-conditioned) rooms, which is where we often eat with Kasma’s tour groups. The restaurant can get very crowded, particularly on weekend nights, so reservations are a good idea.

The Food

The food at A. Mallika is really quite good, both in presentation and in taste. Here are some of the different dishes frequently ordered by Kasma.

Miang Pla Too

One of the dishes Kasma always starts a group with is เมี่ยงปลาทู (Miang Pla Too): Tasty tidbits and a hot-and-sour mackerel salad are wrapped with lettuce leaves and eaten like เมี่ยงคำ (Miang Kum). It’s a fun appetizier, one that you assemble yourself by placing each of the individual ingredients into a leaf, wrapping them all up into a ball and then popping the whole thing into your mouth; the pleasure comes from the delightful explosion of flavors from all the various ingredients.

Kanom Krok

The second appetizer that Kasma orders is ขนมครก (Kanom Krok) – Grilled Coconut-Rice Hot Cakes. Although these are usually made as a street food, many restaurants also have them on the menu. On Kasma’s trips to Thailand, we seldom miss an opportunity to sample some of these delightfully delicious snacks. Here they are made with green onions (scallions) giving a savory edge to the snack. Kanom Krok are typically made with two batters: the lower batter is mostly sweet and the top batter, less of which is added, is salty giving two contrasting flavors to tickle the palate.

It’s very hard to pass up ordering the dish on the right – Crispy-Fried Stewed Pork Leg. First a pork-leg, complete with skin on, is stewed to tenderness. It’s then deep-fried so that the outside is crispy and the fat just next to the skin is somewhat caramelized. It is very delicious.

Hot-and-Sour Soup

Individual serving of soup

Above we see a delicious a ต้มยำ (Tom Yum) – Hot-and-Sour Soup. Very spicy and full of delicious Thai herbs.

Cha-om & Seafood Salad

Oyster Sauce Vegetable

To the left above we see A delicious salad of deep-fried cha-om (a kind of edible tropical acacia), topped with a seafood and chopped pork sauce. It’s spicy, sour and somewhat sweet with the deep-fried green providing an interesting texture. Very delicious.

To the right we see one of our favorite vegetable dishes Stir-fried Vegetables with Oyster Sauce – ผักผัดน้ำมันหอย (Pad Pak Nam Mon Hoi), what I think of as The Universal Vegetable Recipe.

Coconut Ice Cream

We definitely recommend that you leave space for the Coconut Ice Cream – ไอศครีมมะพร้าว (Ai Kreme Maprao) at the end of the meal. It’s more like a sorbet and is tasty and refreshing, a great way to end a meal. If you’re particularly hungry (hard to imagine after all that delicious food!), you can get a larger portion that comes served in a young coconut shell.

Getting to A. Mallika

A Mallika Sign

Map to A. Mallika

It’s not the easiest restaurant to get to. It’s a bit on the outskirts of town and it is easiest to get to if you are able to drive or be driven. You may want to check out the Google Map for A. Mallika.

Ruen Mallika Royal Thai Cuisine

There is a sister restaurant run by the same people: Ruen Mallika Royal Thai Cuisine at 189 Soi Sukhumvit 20, Sukhumvit Road, Klongtoey, Klongtoey, Bangkok 10110. It’s a fancier place with excellent food and is a bit more accessible to central Bangkok. If you go there, we recommend you print out the map from their website – it can be a bit hard to find.

3 Responses to “A Mallika Restaurant in Bangkok”

[…] an essential part of a dish? The Crispy Fried Cha-Om Salad (Yum Cha-Om Krob) above left is from A. Mallika Restaurant in Bangkok. Cha-Om is part of the acacia family – see Kasma’s blog: Cha-Om – A […]

[…] There are two restaurants run by the same company with the name Mallika. Our favorite, and where Kasma always takes her trips to Thailand is actually called A. Mallika. It is a large indoor and outdoor restaurant in the outskirts of town on one of the new highways where many large garden restaurants are located. It has a more extensive menu with unusual dishes not seen in any other restaurants; the food is also better and spicier since it caters mainly to Thai families with cars. Get the sour ribs. They also have a peppered ostrich dish that is good, as is the soft shell crab. Wonderful coconut ice cream. It’s address is 13/10 Moo 9, Kaset-Navamin Road, Boong Koom District, Bangkok 10230, Tel. 0-2946-1000. Check out the photos by a former trip member (click on the photos to see a larger version with caption). Also, check out Michael’s 2012 blog on the subject: A Mallika Restaurant in Bangkok. […]